The 'Elusive' Truth About Kagan
It's not cute when reporters play dumb. Last year, when Barack Obama
nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, CBS anchor Katie
Couric said labeling her "won't be easy." CBS reporter Wyatt Andrews
found "no clear ideology" in her public record. This week, the
Washington Post embarrassed themselves with a front-page story claiming
"Obama has not chosen outspoken liberals in either of his first two
opportunities to influence the makeup of the court."
That
ridiculous sentence collides with a June 8 report by liberal Los
Angeles Times legal reporter David Savage. "The early returns are in,
and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is proving herself to be a reliable liberal
vote on the Supreme Court. Cases this year on campaign speech,
religion, juvenile crime, federal power and Miranda warnings resulted
in an ideological split among the justices, and on every occasion,
Sotomayor joined the liberal bloc."
That verdict came
before Sotomayor voted with the gun-controllers in the Chicago
gun-rights case; before Sotomayor voted for allowing public
universities to deny recognition to Christian student groups who dare
to oppose homosexuality; and before Sotomayor voted as part of a 6-3
minority that it shouldn't be illegal to provide material support to
groups defined by our government as foreign terrorists.
Now match
that record with what the liberal media claimed about Sotomayor. "You
know, for a Democrat, she has a pretty conservative record," NPR
reporter Nina Totenberg announced on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show last
year. "In fact, on a lot of criminal law issues, you could say that
she's more conservative than some members of the Supreme Court,
including Justice Scalia."
If Totenberg sold shoddy diet pills that fraudulently, she'd be a red-hot case for the Federal Trade Commission.
So
why should anyone believe the media are telling the truth now when they
suggest Elena Kagan cannot be called liberal? Kagan's views are
"elusive," the media chant in unison. They all tried to evade Kagan's
vivid writing as a college student in the Daily Princetonian in 1980,
about how she cried and got drunk when Ronald Reagan won and
"ultraconservative" Al D'Amato defeated her candidate, ultraliberal
Democrat Liz Holtzman.
She wished that "our emotion-packed
conclusion that the world had gone mad, that liberalism was dead and
that there was no longer any place for the ideals we held or the
beliefs we espoused" would be replaced by the hope that the Reagan era
would be "marked by American disillusionment with conservative programs
and solutions, and that a new, revitalized, perhaps more leftist left
will once again come to the fore."
Unbelievably, our journalistic geniuses can read that and say Kagan's political views are "elusive."
In
their deference to Obama, the networks barely mentioned Kagan for the
six weeks between her nomination and her confirmation hearings.
Conservative interest groups putting out complaints that she'd be a
radical justice on abortion and "gay marriage" are not newsworthy, even
though liberal interest groups ranting about "far right" Bush nominees
were tenderly solicited by the same networks.
One TV reporter
filed one story that broke the mold. On June 3, CBS legal reporter Jan
Crawford said documents in Thurgood Marshall's papers in the Library of
Congress showed that, "Kagan stood shoulder to shoulder with the
liberal left, including on the most controversial issue Supreme Court
nominees ever confront: abortion."
The White House was furious
that Crawford would dare tell the truth about such a thing. "Their
reaction has been to push back so strongly on allegations, as they
would put it, that she's a liberal," she revealed. "Like there's
something wrong with that, like it's a smear to say their nominee is a
liberal."
When the hearings began, ranking Republican Sen. Jeff
Sessions offered a devastating opening statement documenting Kagan's
extreme liberalism. He ran through her college thesis on socialism that
worried about socialism's demise, and her master's thesis praising the
activism of the Earl Warren Court. He noted how she worked for the
Michael Dukakis for President campaign, and took a leave as a law
school professor to help Joe Biden get liberal Justice Ruth Ginsburg
confirmed.
If that's ancient history, Sessions added that
in 2005, Harvard Law School Dean Kagan joined three other leftist law
school deans to write a letter in opposition to Sen. Lindsey Graham's
amendment on determining who was an "enemy combatant" in the War on
Terror. She compared Graham's amendment to the "fundamentally lawless"
actions of "dictatorships."
The networks skipped those facts in brief, perfunctory news reports.
Liberal
partisans expect the "objective" media to spout obvious lies that there
are no liberals to be found in Obama's Supreme Court selections, that
they have been far too "elusive" to be categorized. That is why
Americans are turning away in droves: they're not finding the media's
biases to be "elusive."
